*

«Donald Trump’s victory and early actions have sparked a backlash with millions of Americans protesting against him across the US. If the anti-Trump coalition is successful, it has little to do with the Democratic Party.»

*

«Many supporters of Bernie Sanders were disillusioned with the Democratic Party.»

«Clearly, the Democratic Party has got to change.» [Bernie Sanders]

* * * * * * * *

«At the moment, the Democratic Party is part of the problem. They can see to which extent they can follow the movement, but at the moment they are perceived by many activists as being more part of the problem than as a potential solution»

*

«This is a generation that believes that between the Clinton-type of a Democratic Party and the Republican Party there is too small a difference in order to mobilize them for actions»

*

«And this phenomenon – a deep distrust and disappointment among millennials with center-left political parties who are being perceived as not having fulfilled their promises – is not limited to the United States, but also present in Europe»

*

«the discontent among many, particularly young people, in the US and Europe who have grown disappointed with the offerings provided by center-left parties»

*

«Democrats need to win back Trump supporters by fixing their own mistakes instead of taking potshots at the president»

*

«He is very Republican mainstream in the content of the views»

*

«But what is really important for people to realize is that the content is not so un-Republican»

*

«he is a mainstream Republican and that he is going to cut taxes on the rich and that he is going to take things away from middle class and lower-income people»

*

«There is a lot of anxiety about the changing demographics in the country»

*

«There is also an economic tie to the anti-immigration views that Trump voters had»

*

«One thing that really differentiated Trump voters from Clinton voters is how hostile they were to immigration, especially from Latin America»

*

«If you connect the economic and the racial issues together and see them as interconnected, you see that the Trump vote makes somewhat more sense.»

*

«I think a lot of this is not that Trump was so clever, but that the Democrats were so dumb»

Democrats need to win back Trump supporters by fixing their own mistakes instead of taking potshots at the president, a US studies scholar told DW. He also explains why Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were out of touch.

*

DW: You argue that US President Donald Trump is less an anomaly than commonly thought. This may sound strange to many people who have observed him and his behavior not just during the campaign but also since becoming president. Why do you think that?

Christopher Newfield: A lot of his positions on policy matters are the same as the right-wing of the Republican Party. His gender attitudes, his antagonism towards abortion – he is now trying to defund Planned Parenthood, which not only provides abortions but also provides basic birth control for low-income people. His interest in privatization using public money to give to private contractors to renew our infrastructure, appointing a Wall Street banker, who profited quite a bit from the housing crisis in 2008/2009, as secretary of the treasury for example. He is very Republican mainstream in the content of the views.

I think what people are shocked by is the way that he promulgates the views, the publicity style, that is quite shocking. It is reality television, not standard politics. He personalizes and makes aggressive his form of address in a way that is really unusual in a Republican Party that sees itself more as establishmentarian. But what is really important for people to realize is that the content is not so un-Republican.

Recent voting analysis shows that not just white, working-class people supported him, but so did many white middle-class and affluent whites. What does that tell you?

It tells me that he is a mainstream Republican and that he is going to cut taxes on the rich and that he is going to take things away from middle class and lower-income people. That’s what the repeal of Obamacare is. His health care plans is called “wealth care” by some people because it pulls about $800 billion over the next 10 years out of the health care system and gives it to upper-income people in the form of tax cuts.

If Trump’s support in the election went beyond the often mentioned disadvantaged white people who were simply desperate enough to vote for someone who promised to shake up the system what does this mean for our picture of him and of his voters?

There is an inseparability in the US of racial issues and economic issues, which are class issues. There is a lot of anxiety about the changing demographics in the country. My state, California, is basically minority-majority. Whites are basically a minority and what used to be called minority groups now together are actually the majority in the state. That is happening, more slowly, everywhere in the country. There is a sort of discomfort with demographic change.

Perhaps 15 percent of whites in the country hold white supremacist views. But you don’t become president by just getting those people. There are also folks that are not necessarily racist, but what I would call racially anxious and they are uncomfortable with changing racial ratios. They see immigration from Latin American in particular and to some extent from Asia as economically threatening.

There is also an economic tie to the anti-immigration views that Trump voters had. One thing that really differentiated Trump voters from Clinton voters is how hostile they were to immigration, especially from Latin America. If you thought this was a major issue, you were much more likely to vote for Trump than for Clinton. That too has an economic dimension.

At the sort of bottom or lower-middle class, there are trade skills that you used to be able to raise a family on 30 or 40 years ago and you can’t anymore, for instance being a dry-waller or being a carpenter or working at some level in unskilled manufacturing. Those wages are no longer living family wages. A lot of white folks blame immigration for that. They blame immigrants instead of blaming business owners or the business system, capitalism, as such, which is the structure that created this race to the bottom in terms of wages.

This means if you are a contractor you basically can’t compete with other contractors unless you are paying people only $8 (7.10 euros) an hour to do drywall, which you can best do if you have a lot of undocumented folks coming in, who don’t have any choice but to take what you are paying. If you connect the economic and the racial issues together and see them as interconnected, you see that the Trump vote makes somewhat more sense.

The other big picture is that the Democrats had the White House for eight years and the economy really recovered well for banks and it really recovered well for mergers and acquisitions and lawyers and it recovered really well for doctors and engineers. But people who work in agriculture or construction, people who have small businesses outside the big metro areas – they never recovered.

A lot of those people never got their houses back. Their kids are unemployed living at home or they are working only 30 hours a week for $8-$10 an hour. They are looking at Obama up there saying we need more trade agreements and that it has been a great recovery and they are saying, “This guy is out of touch.”

Then when Hillary Clinton runs, sort of under the Obama umbrella, and she says essentially the same thing and uses these vague phrases like “I am going to invest in you.” People just hear another Democrat who is going to favor well-educated people, city people, and also people of color over the heartland folks who aren’t as attractive and well-educated and in the mix as these Democratic university people.

I think a lot of this is not that Trump was so clever, but that the Democrats were so dumb. They used to say, “It’s the economy, stupid” and they forgot. Hillary Clinton did not stand up there and say, “Donald is not going give you jobs, he is going to give tax breaks to his rich friends, but I am going to give you jobs and here are the two things that I am going to do to make that happen.”

So when she said “I am going to invest in you,” it sounds like, “Oh, you are going to send my kid to a job training program for a technology that is already five years out of date.” It just doesn’t add up. The evidence for this happening is that the base for Democrats did not turn up. A lot of what happened is not that Trump did so swell, but Clinton just didn’t turn out her core people.

What would Democrats need to do differently to appeal to those people who voted for Trump now?

I think they have to do two things at once.

They have to significantly differentiate themselves from Republicans on foreign policy and interventionism. One of Trump’s popular positions was “I am not going to be out there intervening everywhere.” And, of course, one of the first things he did was shoot cruises missiles at Syria. It is not like he is actually going to do what he said. But people did like what he said, which was we are going to take care of our own, we are going to build our bridges, we are not going to build Iraqi bridges. Selfish, but it worked.

Democrats have to do a version of that – big infrastructure and jobs programs. Democrats have to go back – or forward – to a version of Roosevelt: “Here is a $100 billion and everyone in northern Wisconsin is going to have some kind of job, our commitment is full employment. And in the longer term we will figure out some kind of retraining program, but first everybody is working.”

Then on the economy they have to do what people sort of denigrated as populist. They have to drop the university-type of arguments in favor of trade, the abstract stuff about balance of payments and the skills gap and how we just naturally have a value chain where manufacturing just has to go to China because the laws of economics. They need to chuck that and say we are going to figure out how to have good jobs here and we are going to set all of our university economists on the full employment chain and not the outsource your job to another country chain, which is what the Democrats have been doing for 25 years.

Do you think Democrats are on track to do what you just outlined?

No.

Why not?

Because the Clintonist wing of the party still controls the national party. The fact that they have lost 1,000 legislative seats in the states while Obama was in office is less important for that group than that they retain control of the national party. You can tell that I am a bit more on the Bernie Sanders side of things. There needs to be some kind of discussion and reconciliation. But what they are doing instead – because it’s so fun and easy – is taking potshots at Trump.

The real disaster is if they spend the next two years leading up to congressional elections in 2018 doing what they did during the campaign, which is to say that Donald Trump is unfit for office. He has to be treated like a normal politician who is wrong about everything, but not like a pathological person that you need to call medical attendants to take away.

Donald Trump’s victory and early actions have sparked a backlash with millions of Americans protesting against him across the US. If the anti-Trump coalition is successful, it has little to do with the Democratic Party.

*

The massive opposition against President Donald Trump which manifested itself during the Women’s March, in airport protests against his travel ban or on the Day Without Immigrants action is poised to have a sustainable impact on the American political landscape – even if it may not be apparent right away.

One of the lessons of the history of social movements is that they take time to develop and that what is publicly visible often does not tell the full story, said Donatella della Porta, a scholar of international social movements at the European University Institute in Florence.

Applied to the broad opposition against Trump, that means that the protests against him are only the tip of iceberg, said della Porta. It also means, she said, that “one cannot force, one cannot push too much towards a high level unity when there are heterogeneous groups involved.”

One of the many people who have been heartened by the large turnout against Donald Trump is Jenn Kauffman, an executive with Revolution Messaging, the agency behind former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ digital strategy and online fundraising.

Grassroots actions

“We see that everyday Americans who are horrified by Trump’s disastrous agenda are mobilizing and turning into a sustained, grassroots political force,” Kauffman said via email.

As a Latina who has worked on migrant rights and labor issues, the Day without Immigrants action, while not as visually strong as the huge protest marches, served for Kauffman as an important sign of what the anti-Trump coalition is capable of.

“Perhaps one of the most successful recent grassroots actions was ‘A Day without Immigrants,’ which saw rallies and boycotts in cities across the country made up of both immigrants and allies alike,” she said.

While the anti-Trump coalition is already successful in its own right, noted della Porta, to have a lasting impact it could take a page out of the playbook of earlier social movements regardless whether they lean right like the Tea Party movement or left like the Occupy movement.

From the Tea Party movement, the anti-Trump coalition could copy the sentiment that a decentralized organizational structure is to be preferred over a top-down approach; from the Occupy Movement, that language and values matter.

Socialist Sanders

“If Sanders could say ‘I am socialist’ it is also because a movement like Occupy, which has changed the language of politics,” said della Porta.

According to Kauffman, those lessons, even if they stem from the political opposition, have not gone unnoticed.”Progressives are using some organizing lessons gleaned from the rise of the Tea Party, but doing it without the dishonest scare tactics and harassment the Tea Party employed,” she said.

“Progressives are connecting with each other digitally and locally, through resources like Daily Action, a daily text service with 250,000 members and the Indivisible Guide, which has inspired the creation of more than 4,500 local groups, and they’re using those connections to help drive a drumbeat of pressure on Congress and the White House.”

Not about party politics

Asked about the role of the Democratic Party in the anti-Trump movement, della Porta, who currently researches populism on the left, is blunt: “At the moment, the Democratic Party is part of the problem. They can see to which extent they can follow the movement, but at the moment they are perceived by many activists as being more part of the problem than as a potential solution.”

“This movement is not first of all about party politics,” she added. “It is a movement of a generation – the millennials which had been massively overrepresented among the voters of Sanders. This is a generation that believes that between the Clinton-type of a Democratic Party and the Republican Party there is too small a difference in order to mobilize them for actions.”

That’s why many of these young people did either not vote for Clinton at all or did so unenthusiastically. Instead of engaging in traditional party politics, said della Porta, they demand more decentralized politics and are eager to harness the internet and social media for political mobilization.

Transnational movement

And this phenomenon – a deep distrust and disappointment among millennials with center-left political parties who are being perceived as not having fulfilled their promises – is not limited to the United States, but also present in Europe.

That’s why “the transnationalization of the actions against Trump,” as della Porta calls it, is important not only because social movements in the US have a tendency to remain parochial. It could also provide a joint opposition against the policies of the Trump administration, which are not just pernicious for the US but for Europe as well, said della Porta, and give voice to the discontent among many, particularly young people, in the US and Europe who have grown disappointed with the offerings provided by center-left parties.